On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 10:43:18PM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote:
> Testing also has just little protection against severe breakage if it is
> frozen and updates need to go through rarely used suites. An example
> illustrates this quite well:
Thanks for this example Carsten. However, one example is not enough
evidence to say that testing provide little protection. We can always
find bad examples of this kind, for any suite. I'm pretty sure we can
find horror stories even for stable, but from that we cannot conclude
that the protection you get against horror stories in stable is lower
than the one you would get in testing or unstable.
> A 'frozen' requiring most updates to go through *-proposed-updates would
> make this quarantine period a lot less useful, and it would make
> circumstances like the one described above a lot more probable.
I do agree with this: any parallel path comes with its own risks of
reducing package testing. Once more, for me this discussion is really
about two orthogonal aspects: the goal of having a user-targeted testing
(on which we might agree or disagree) and the specific way we choose to
achieve it (which might have issues as the one embodied by your
example).
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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